Mobilizing to Protect Electoral Integrity

Over at the Duck of Minerva, two Indiana University professors – Jeffrey C. Isaac and W. Kindred Winecoff – have a post about the petition they’ve been circulating to protect the integrity of U.S. elections. Here’s an excerpt:

Within 6 hours 500 of our colleagues had signed. Within 48 hours over 950 had signed. Among the signatories were some of the most distinguished political scientists in the U.S.; many past-presidents of the American Political Science Association (and the current president as well); and hundreds of the most dedicated teachers of American politics in U.S. higher education. This is a pretty striking response. As the political scientists who circulated the letter, and who are in a sense “participant observers,” we think it is important to explain this phenomenon—the rather phenomenal worry of so many people who study and teach about politics for a living.

The full post is worth a read. Petitions are obviously low-hanging fruit, but I think this underscores the need to do more than sit around (metaphorically speaking) and wait for politicians to take action.

Dan Nexon is an Associate Professor of Government and Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
His most recent book, Exit from Hegemony: the Unravelling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press), is co-authored with Alexander Cooley.